Four Days in,
Osaka.

Osaka's main landmark, a white-and-green main tower on a huge stone base ringed by two moats, sits in a 260-acre park in the middle of the city. What you climb today is a 1931 concrete rebuild with a museum inside, not the 1583 original, but the walls, moats, and gates around it are the real thing.

A covered market street about a third of a mile long with roughly 150 shops, most of them selling seafood, wagyu, fruit, and pickles. It calls itself Osaka's kitchen, and the grill-and-eat counters have made it one of the city's busiest tourist stops.

Sanpei is a seafood shop in the middle of Kuromon that runs a sushi and sashimi counter alongside its fish cases. The pieces are oversized by Tokyo standards, the pace is fast, and the crowd is a mix of market shoppers and visitors who followed the line.

A narrow flagstone alley of tiny bars and restaurants that runs about 260 feet beside Hozenji temple, one block south of the Dotonbori canal. The temple's Mizukake Fudo statue is furred with moss because visitors have been splashing it with water for close to a century.

Osaka's main shopping arcade, a glass-roofed street 0.4 miles long linking Dotonbori with Shinsaibashi subway station. Big chains and the Daimaru department store anchor the north end; drugstores, souvenir shops, and cosmetics outlets pack the south.

A canal-side street of giant mechanical signs, restaurants, and neon that has been Osaka's entertainment district for 400 years. The Glico running man and the Kani Doraku crab are the city's two best-known signs, and the strip is at its brightest from dusk until midnight.

A family okonomiyaki shop on Dotonbori that opened in 1945 and has stayed on the same street ever since. The griddle counter seats a couple dozen people, and most of the menu is variations on the house yam-based batter.

Japan's first state-sponsored Buddhist temple, founded in 593 by Prince Shotoku, with a five-story pagoda, a main hall, and a lecture hall lined up on one axis inside a walled precinct. The buildings are postwar concrete rebuilt to the 6th-century plan, and the layout is what art historians call the Shitennoji style.

A 338-foot steel tower from 1956 at the center of Shinsekai, a neighborhood laid out in 1912 as an entertainment district and largely frozen since the 1960s. The tower's neon, the puffer-fish lanterns, and the kushikatsu shops packed around its base make it Osaka's most photographed corner after Dotonbori.

Kushikatsu Daruma is the original deep-fried skewer shop of Shinsekai, a 1929 counter joint that grew into a chain with more than a dozen branches. The Sohonten, the main store, is still the tiny original, with the scowling owner's face on the sign.

A 984-foot skyscraper above Osaka Abenobashi station with a three-floor observatory on floors 58 to 60, including an open-air atrium on 58. It was Japan's tallest building from 2014 until Tokyo's Azabudai Hills passed it in 2023.

A takoyaki stand with a few standing spots, wedged into the Shin-Umeda Shokudogai food alley beside Osaka station. Its takoyaki come under a mound of chopped green onion and mayonnaise, a topping the shop made famous.

Two 40-story towers joined at the top by a ring-shaped Floating Garden Observatory, with an open-air roof deck 568 feet up and escalators that cross the gap between the towers in glass tubes. It is the best open-air view in Osaka and the only one with wind in your face.

Kiji is an Umeda okonomiyaki name with two shops: the original counter in Shin-Umeda Shokudogai and this branch in the Sky Building's Takimi-koji alley. Both run a short menu built around modan-yaki and sujiyaki, the beef-tendon version.

The Kintetsu Nara line is the direct route from downtown Osaka to Nara's temples, running from beneath Namba to a station at the edge of Nara Park. Rapid Express trains take about 40 minutes and run several times an hour.

The head temple of the Kegon school, where a 49-foot, 500-ton bronze Buddha sits in a wooden hall that ranked as the world's largest wooden building for most of its history. The temple is part of Nara's UNESCO World Heritage listing and the reason most people come to the city.

A 1,200-acre public park east of Nara's center where about 1,200 wild sika deer roam between Todai-ji, Kasuga Taisha, and the national museum. The deer are protected as a natural monument and have learned to bow for crackers.

A thatched-roof teahouse under the trees on the pilgrim path to Kasuga Taisha, serving simple noodles and sweets to walkers. It is one of the last old-style resting places in the park.

Nara's great Shinto shrine, founded in 768 to protect the new capital and the Fujiwara clan, and known for its 3,000 lanterns: roughly 2,000 stone ones along the approach and 1,000 bronze ones hanging from the vermilion halls. It sits at the foot of Mount Kasuga, whose forest has been protected since 841.

A small mochi shop by Kintetsu-Nara station whose staff pound rice at full speed in the street, a few seconds of hammer strikes with a bare hand turning the rice between each blow. The mochi is sold warm, and the show has made the shop famous far beyond Nara.

A Namba okonomiyaki restaurant known for negiyaki, the thin green-onion pancake that is Osaka's other griddle specialty. It's a big operation with a long counter, and the lines outside are long too.

One of the world's largest aquariums, built around a 30-foot-deep central tank holding whale sharks, rays, and about 1.4 million gallons of water. You enter at the top and walk a spiral ramp down eight floors, watching the same tank from the surface to the seabed.

A 369-foot Ferris wheel on the Tempozan waterfront, tall enough to look down on the aquarium roof and across to the Rokko mountains. It opened in 1997 as the world's tallest, and its rim lights up at night with a color-coded weather forecast.

A themed food alley inside the Tempozan Marketplace mall, built to look like Osaka in the mid-1960s, with about 20 stalls serving the city's standard street food. It's a mall food court underneath, which is exactly what you want at lunchtime with a ferry to catch.

A small passenger boat that crosses the mouth of the Aji river between Tempozan and Universal City, linking the aquarium and the theme park with ten minutes of water instead of forty of trains.

Osaka's theme park on the bay, opened in 2001 and now one of the two most-visited theme park resorts in Japan, with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Super Nintendo World, and Japan-only attractions built around anime and local pop culture.

A food court on the 4th floor of the CityWalk mall outside Universal Studios Japan, where five of Osaka's best-known takoyaki shops each run a counter: Aizuya, Kukuru, Kougaryu, Yamachan, and Jyuhachiban. Shared seating, a souvenir shop, and a small exhibit on takoyaki history.